You don't think "incentivizing" migration (but closing off the safe routes, yet not closing the detention centers, is, because... they must have missed the memo about our border policies...thonkang) is an answer to people dying right now at the hands of regimes, terrorists, and scarcity... because if you enforce scarcity by letting them max out their scarcity and slow their population growth (because so many would just die because no resources) constitutes less overall deaths somehow.

That is about the gist of your thesis.

My position is this: either africans *care* about available resources when deciding on reproducing, or they don't.

If they do care, there wouldn't be a problem to discuss. They simply would reproduce according to the resources.

If they don't care, your argument would simply fall flat, because it's predicated on their reaction to some "hole" left behind by migrants, which for all they know and care about, doesn't exist.

On the correlation thing, which is the only other part I care to discuss at the moment, you prove a correlation after asserting it (like for instance comparing graphs of school shooting occurence and airtime of the cosby show or something) by measuring each factor while varying the others (and keeping the rest stable). If you never make it past the assertion stage because you lack the relevant data, the correlation is useless and so policy should not be made based upon it. As it so happens, population growth is correlated with numerous factors, so good luck on that.

Proving a correlation exists opens you up to the causation stage: finding all possible factors you haven't considered which could be the original factor all other factors correlate to. And then you still have to consider ethics: if you managed to prove that video games cause violent behaviour, it would not necessarily be more ethical to ban video games until we figured out what exactly it is about video games that causes violent behaviour, and if we can influence it.

And if you managed to prove a correlation between migration and population growth, you'd still have to demonstrate the maths behind the alleviated suffering via migration versus the increased suffering in the home country, and set the deadline at which point saving millions of lives will stop paying off, because I'm bored and I want to conjure up a realistic plan of action for making africa fertile and independent by then.

PS: if you're really that concerned for starving people in africa, there's a hundred better ways to advocate for improvement in that regard than by going "migration policies are important because it slightly changes just how many people die miserably each year exactly". I loathe it when people fake concern in this way, like those 'sea watch kill refugees' shitheads, it's so obviously fake and reactionary.